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“... said, but he spoke too soon. We might feel the same about the situation proposed by the title of Mario Puzo’s new novel, now sitting comfortably at number four in the New York Times bestseller list. Don Domenico Clericuzio, the ageing mobster grandee in this book, is said to have led his family to ‘the very heights of power’, using only the ...”

“... tragedy is hard, but comedy is murder; Bruce Jay Friedman, who wrote novels, plays and movies; Mario Puzo, who made a fortune with his novel The Godfather; and Speed Vogel, who resists summary. Heller’s wife Shirley in her youth had been a friend of Vogel’s sister on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In 1962, she ran into Vogel on the beach at Fire ...”

“... countenance reviving the form. The Godfather has had prequels and sequels. In this latest work, Puzo supplies us with what may be called an interquel. The Sicilian returns to that part of the original narrative in which Michael Corleone found refuge in Sicily. We knew that the Don-apparent married, and lost his wife by vendetta there. Now we are to ...”

“... Doris on the Other Side herself now?). The Krays were gangsters, not thieves, and Damon Runyan and Mario Puzo have ensured that we are more interested in heavies than light-fingered chaps. Billy Hill and Jack Spot, the Fifties London gang leaders, have both had their memoirs ghosted but few of the big heisters have bequeathed their papers to the ...”

“... or the Marxist view of the labour market. Beyond that, we do not get very far. The novelist Mario Puzo is quoted to the effect that people gamble in search of a lost childhood innocence and out of a desire to be happy; they call the other players’ bluffs in order the better to bluff themselves. Mercifully, in Tap City these ideas are almost ...”

“... for his or her own actions – everything they do,’ he wrote in his final journals, quoting Mario Puzo. It was hardly a volte-face.) I have yet to discover a single account of Burroughs in which people who knew him fail to mention his impeccable manners, his kindness, his generosity; they invariably refer to him as ‘a true gentleman’. The ...”

“... photographs. He may no longer even be alive. Nevertheless, according to the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, Guzman is ‘the object of religious devotion’ to his Senderista followers and of holy terror to Peru’s middle classes. Nicholas Shakespeare’s fascination with Sendero Luminoso expressed itself in a remarkable journalistic essay, ‘In ...”